THE ART WORLD HOPE AND GLORY A Shepard Fairey moment. BY PETER SCHJELDAHL I t was only about a year ago, though it feels like half a lifetime, that Shepard Fairey created the most efficacious Amer- ican political illustration since "Uncle Sam Wants You": the Obama "Hopè' poster. In innumerable variants, the craning, in- tent, elegant mien of the candidate en- gulfed the planet. I won't forget coming across it, last summer, stencilled on a side- - ' If. · . ({ : ( . ::J ,, !(I' ; ';I ',\ ',;1. 'I" J- = = 'I" "',,' "" ',I,' . ,: .'" '" j _ - _) - ( ,',' '____ "I,' - - ,'" "/''''::'''''''''; .'''-r ' '-11 '.'j_ ] J I = , - \ '- · J= It - GrORGE ORWELL L -, tff." --' . (!! ".. n t:'\ 'U' þ' , r.u- r.u- ru- Þ<::>' þ , Þ , graphs into solid darks and blank lights, thus rendering volumetric subjects dead flat. Mentally restoring those splotches to rounded substance makes us feel clever, on the important condition that the subject excites us enough to elicit the effort. The reward with Faireys picture was a thrill of concerted purpose, guarded against fatuity by coolly candid deliberation. The effect is - - f student in Providence, he took to applying gnomic stickers and posters, without per- mission, to buildings and signs. The sig- nature image of his street work is the car- tooned face of the wrestler Andre the Giant (André René Roussimo who died in 1993, and is fondly remembered for his role in the 1987 :film ''The Princess Bridè'), accompanied at first by the wacky caption "Andre the Giant Has a Possè' and later by "Obey Giant" or, simply, "Obey." Lyr- ically paranoid, the motif was inspired by the artist's reading of George Orwell's " A . al F " d " 1984 " mm arm an -a connec- tion that looped back to the source last year when Penguin U.K. reissued those books with new cover designs, by Fairey. Fairey's street work popularized a going fashion for academic deconstruction, with ', ",-, '.. . I \ ,.. -- - -- t, f I f .. "\ " .,- t. . :' I :1 .. '" 3 . , . -, 1 Fairey's cover for a 2008 British edition of Orwell's nove which he cites as an inspiration, and a wall of Fairey's street posters. walk of a hamlet in the upper Catskills, where cell phones don't work and most people, if they vote at all, vote Republican. Underfoot, the small, tidy image orga- nized its rustic environs as a frame for it- self, like Wallace Stevens's jar in Ten- a... S nessee. I was delighted, as an Obama ð supporter. But I was a trifle disturbed, too, by the intrusion on a tranquil-and, it suddenly proved, defenseless-reality of , weathered houses amid humpback moun- (/) a tains. The result was strident and mystical, yanking my mind into a placeless jet stream of abstract associations. It exploited a fa- miliar graphic device-exalted and refined I- by Andy Warhol-of polarizing photo- that of epic poetry in an everyday tongue. A "Hopè' poster hangs alongside about two hundred and fifty slick and, for the most part, far more resistible works in a Fairey retrospective, his first, at the Insti- tute of Contemporary Art, in Boston. The thirty-nine-year-old Fairey, a Los Angeles-based street artist, graphic designer, and entrepreneur, was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where his father is a doctor. At fourteen, Fairey, a budding rascal, started decorat- ing skateboards and T -shirts. He gradu- ated from the technically rigorous Rhode Island School of Design with a bachelor's degree in illustration, in 1992. While a pretensions to exposing the malign oper- ations of mass culture. Hip rather than populist, the Andre campaign projects an audience dumb enough to fall for media manipulation while smart enough to ab- sorb a critique of it. And, of course, it's vandalism-in the vein of urban graffiti- invading environments whose inhabitants, for all any artist knows, might value them just as they are. Boston's LC.A. has con- doned a citywide smattering of street art by Fairey, as an extension of the show. That makes sense. So does the decision of the Boston police to arrest him for it, on his way to the show's opening. Fairey has run into a similarly predict- THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 23, 2009 79